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Sunday, October 09, 2016

A Tour by Handcart of Babel, Bedlam, and the Land of Nod Beyond

The City of Tomorrow

U of T psychology
professor Jordan Peterson is under fire. A campus rally last
Wednesday called for his firing. His offense was to publicly insist
on the right to continue to use the English third person singular
subject pronouns: he, she, it. A lesson I happen to be teaching to a
Chinese student today. What I am still teaching as simply correct
grammar, is now a risky political position in Canada.

Doesn’t that
strike anyone as a bit odd?

Chris Selley rushes
to Dr. Peterson’s defense in the National Post. Sort of. He accepts
the professor’s insistence on using standard grammar as a
legitimate exercise of freedom of speech. But he does call Peterson a
“total jerk” for it. He asks “what kind of jerk refuses to
refer to someone as he, she or they would like? They’re human
beings, not issues.”

The point is, of
course, that some people who are objectively male now demand the
right to be referred to as “she,” some who are objectively female
now insist on “he,” and some who insist they are neither the one
nor the other, or both at once, demand to be referred to now as “ze,”
or “xe,”or something else.

While the matter
might in itself seem trivial, forcing everyone to acquiesce to this
right to choose one’s own personal pronouns forces two other
people, each time, to accept and consent to two dubious and dangerous
assertions: that the rules of language and grammar are a personal
possession, and that one’s sex is a matter of free choice. The
problem with the first contention is that, if each of us may impose
our own vocabulary and grammar on anyone speaking about us,
communication is no longer possible. Language ceases to be as soon as
it is not shared. It cannot by its nature be a personal possession.

The problem with the
second contention is greater: by it not only words, but things, are
subjective and infinitely fungible. Physical sex is not a matter of
opinion or preference, in any sense that height, age, or eye colour
are not. It is encoded as ROM in every cell. Can I declare myself
twenty-five? Many would like to. How about making myself aboriginal,
and so qualifying for various federal subsidies? Can I say I’m
seven feet tall, and angle for a basketball scholarship? Can my new
IQ be 200?

It all sounds lovely
on its face. To begin with, I could be invisible and fly. It’s
almost like a dream come true. One can see the attraction. But a lot
else follows once we decide that a firm personal belief determines
reality, even against the evince of the senses. It is all the stuff
conventionally called insanity.

And I am not talking
here of slippery slopes. It is not that accepting that sex is up for
grabs might one day lead to all the rest. All the rest is already
here, in some circles, and has been for some time. You already read
it in Marcuse in the drug-soaked sixties; you read it in the
seventies in the Teachings of Don Juan. It was the self-actualization
movement. It is postmodernism. There is no objective truth. “Reality
is a function of belief.”

First person and second person discuss third person, holding the oar, in the fifth circle of hell.

We are instantly at
the bottom of this slope; or rather, as soon as we plant our mental
handcart on it, it dissolves beneath us, and we find ourselves in the
nether regions. Where is the logical difference, the possible
distinction, between a man who feels in his deepest heart that he is
really a woman, and a man who feels in his deepest heart that he is
Napoleon Bonaparte?

If there is to be no
objective check on our beliefs, anything is possible. And anything
possible is real.

The defenders of
this new postmodern theory of reality will no doubt point out that it
is possible to make a distinction between personal fantasies that
harm no one else, and those that do. The former ought fairly to be
indulged, while the latter can be opposed.

But they have
already violated that principle, in demanding that everyone else
accept each individuals inner conviction of their own sex. Why does
the third person in every conversation have the right to his, her, or
its own reality, but not the first person or the second person? If C
gets to tell A and B what to do, is the rule not already violated?

There is no way to
square this circle. Postmodernism is founded on the notion that two
mutually contradictory truths can happily coexist. They cannot; and
the a priori truth that they cannot is, as Aristotle pointed out, the
basis of all logic. Accept this idea of the malleability of reality
based on belief, and all possibility of logic or reasoned discernment
is lost. That is no small matter.

Among so many other
things, this means that no classic distinction between my rights and
yours can any longer be maintained. We can no longer say that what
you believe is only your business so long as it does not harm me.
What, for example, if my heart tells me that I am actually you, and
you are me? What if it tells me, with a deep Buddhist profundity,
that we are all one? Where is the possible distinction between my
beliefs and yours then? And what if it tells me you are working with
the CIA, or with sinister alien beings, and are secretly trying to
control me with your radioactive brainwaves? Surely, the right of
self-defense allows me to act accordingly. What if my heart tells me
that what you consider harm is actually to your benefit. What if I
believe you would be better off without a head?

Bethlehem Royal Hospital, 1735. Yonge and Bloor, 2016.

But why even bother
with these relatively strenuous mental contortions? What is left to
save any distinction anyway between the moral good and evil, between
right and wrong? If there is no truth, why prefer the one over the
other? Isn’t it all just another matter of personal choice?

That is just what
postmodernism, constructivism, and “cultural relativism” argues
already. Welcome to the bottom.

Given this path we
have apparently already civilizationally chosen, no laws, no social
contracts, no contracts of any kind, and no social institutions, will
have any predictable or reliable results. It must, in the end, be
total civilizational collapse. And not in the long run. In the very
short run.

The only question
then is whether another civilization has the moral strength to take
over.

Or is there perhaps
a chance to preserve something in remote monasteries?